MOO2

higher education in serious, and silly, moments, with the lagniappe of personal reflections on sundry topics. "(Moo) was really fun to write. I laughed at all the jokes - it was probably my favorite writing experience - so I liked it very much." ~Jane Smiley

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Recess Time is Ovah!

From Jim Horn's Schools Matter, it's all work and no play for today's primary students, who will bring a grim, imposed Puritanism to our colleges soon enough.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

New Group Blog on Education

I am one of the founders of a new group blog on the cultural foundations of education, called The Wall. Nick Burbules, Craig Cunningham, and I have talked for over a year about starting a blog that deals with educational issues from the perspective of cultural foundations (sometimes called social foundations: the historical, philosophical, sociological, and other ways of looking at and researching educational phenomena).

We also have developed a procedure where one of our merrie band posts a "keystone" entry each week, and the others comment upon it. Of course anyone who reads the blog can comment, and we hope to encourage a conversation across many disciplines and areas on these issues. By this means, we hope to encourage more coherence and unity in presentation of topics than is evident on some other group blogs.

I was up first this week, as we started in earnest. Here is my "keystone" post, "Going beyond a 'short-lived and illusory' brilliance."

Each individual is born with a distinctive temperament…We indiscriminately employ children of different bents on the same exercises; their education destroys the special bent and leaves a dull uniformity. Therefore after we have wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see the short-lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die away, while the natural abilities we have crushed do not revive. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau cited in John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916).

What Rousseau called “the same exercises” over two hundred years ago is the reality today in many schools around the world. Last fall I taught a new graduate seminar on John Dewey, with special emphasis upon his legacy in current teaching and learning. I should rather say current books and articles by university professors. We read these hopeful tomes that argued and mapped how we could cultivate or revive participative practices in teaching and learning.

But there is a chasm between what these professors, all friends of mine and fine authors, advocate, and what actually is happening in most schools. There is scant legacy of Dewey’s progressivism, and certainly even less evidence of the cultivation of Rousseau’s “true gifts of nature” in classroom practice. In this country, under the continuous pressures of standardized assessment measures only ratcheted up by No Child Left Behind, too many teachers and their students are ground down…might one say abused? Who then can blame many teachers for wanting only to know what to teach and for their students only what to master for a grade? Don’t hit me; I will do what you say.

The situation is hardly better in much of higher education. At my university, Socrates is described on a monument dedicated to the university’s best teachers as someone who “orated” at his student Plato’s Academy, though Socrates sipped hemlock 12 years before the Academy was established. Perhaps my students don’t feel PowerPoint slides on Socrates in a large lecture hall are all that unusual, given his designation as a smooth speaker from the grave.

Flickering brightness, such as what Tim Burke advocates as “interoperability,” is there, but such are too few and unsupported to make a great deal of difference, at least now. Burke, writing on his blog in response to Gerald Posner’s comments on the effects of the resignation of Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, thinks his neologism is an idea whose time has come:

That’s not a word that flows off the tongue easily, but in this case, it’s just the thing I have in mind. The more that faculty are transparent to each other, dependent upon one another, the more that their expertise is mobile to sites and areas of changing interest, the faster their institutions can respond to new challenges, both intellectual and fiscal. This isn’t so much changing the way faculty formally participate in governance as it is a re-engineering of their institutional cultures of practice, a structured lowering of the transaction costs that presently make universities so sluggish in the face of change, that produce so many nooks and crannies for feudal turf wars.

But I find hope in Burke’s idea. It’s generative and may lead us back to more fecund ways of relating to each other. I wish I knew ways and means I could help my colleagues in the schools achieve their own forms of “interoperability.”

Faculty Work is Back Breaking

An e-mail forwarded from my building deputy:

Periodically, faculty and staff clean their office/lab space. The items discarded may sometimes overload the recycling and trash receptacles.The added weight increases the potential for the custodial staff to injure themselves while lifting these heavy receptacles. Please observe the following office/lab space cleaning guidelines so we may minimize the risk of strain injuries to our staff.1. Please provide a minimum of 2 days' notice to the custodial staff in your building prior to a clean-out or move-out so they may arrange for appropriate recycling and trash containers.2. Please separate heavy books and publications from normal office paper and mark it as trash. Feel free to ask custodial staff where they prefer to have such items placed for pick up.3. Please separate and identify the type of waste. Instead of shredding confidential or sensitive information, you may contact the Refuse and Recycling Center for confidential recycling containers, and further guidelines for other items.Thank you for your cooperation and assistance in helping to provide a safe working environment for our staff.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Buckeye Chimps at risk

I regularly get updates from Jane Goodall regarding chimps, in particular I remember being asked to protest the Career Builder Super Bowl ad where chimps sit at computers and make fun of a human. We coax, poke, and abuse chimps so they can "entertain" us.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Academic AWOL article

Excellent column for anyone who has ever written anything, waited for someone to deliver something written, or put off delivering something to be written. In other words, all of us. Several of the blogoscenti have chimed in too, from Kieran Healy's related idea of declaration of academic bankruptcy to Bitch PhD's suggestion that this article be taped to everyone's wall. As always with Inside Higher Ed (and this an advantage, IMHO, over the CHE), comments provide interesting sidelights and discussion.